Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is an American radio producer and distributor that specializes in news, public affairs, and cultural programming.

NPR was launched in 1970 as a collaboration among the nation’s public-broadcasting stations. It is not a radio station itself, but instead a central news organization that produces, licenses, and distributes a variety of programs to its member stations.

Despite the “public” in its name, very little of NPR’s funding comes directly from the U.S. government — just over 5 percent came from all levels of government as of the late 2000s. Nearly half of NPR’s funding comes from dues and fees from member stations, and about the same amount comes from corporate underwriting, foundations, and grants. In 2003, it was given $236 million by Joan Kroc, the wife of former McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc. It was the largest gift any news organization has ever received. The gift funded a newsroom expansion, and most of the money went into an endowment.

It has also faced criticism over a perceived liberal bias, highlighted by two controversies in 2010 and 2011. In October 2010, NPR fired news analyst Juan Williams over remarks he made about Muslims while a guest on the Fox News Channel, and in March 2011, an NPR fundraising executive was videotaped making disparaging remarks about the Tea Party, in an undercover operation orchestrated by the conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe. In both cases, NPR’s handling of the incidents drew rounds of censure from critics (including its ombudsman) as well as calls for the organization to lose its federal funding. In the wake of the latter incident, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned under pressure from the organization’s board. Her successor, Gary Knell, resigned after less than two years to take a position at the National Geographic Society. He was succeeded in 2014 by former MTV and E! executive Jarl Mohn.

In 2008, NPR laid off 64 people — 7 percent of its staff — and eliminated two programs, Day to Day and News and Notes. NPR then made further cuts in 2009. The cuts were blamed largely on a drop-off in corporate underwriting. It faced an anticipated $6 million deficit in 2013 and announced a voluntary buyout program intended to cut 10% of its staff in order to balance its budget by 2015. Three months later, it announced it was receiving $17 million in grants from four foundations and three individuals to improve its reporting on education and global health and develop a new listening platform.

In early 2010, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would create five regional journalism centers focusing on local reporting through partnerships with PBS and NPR stations. The centers would feed content to national shows on both broadcasters through a $7.5 million grant with an additional $3 million contributed by the stations.

NPR is also working with American Public Media, Public Radio Exchange, Public Radio International, and PBS to produce an open API that will allow public media organizations to share content with each other and with other outlets.

The Huffington Post is an American news and blog network run by author and political activist Arianna Huffington and owned by AOL. The Huffington Post, commonly called HuffPost or HuffPo, was the 6th-largest news site in the United States as of April 2011 and attracted 40 million monthly unique visitors in January 2012. The site…

Put Encyclo on your site

Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML: